The death of Flash has been greatly exaggerated

Following the news that the iPad would not support the Flash plugin, some people have been clamoring for the death of Flash. Not so fast cowboy, that horse ain't dead yet!. Although it is true that Flash is far from perfect it is currently a necessary evil because so many web games and web application are written in Flash.

It is a fact that the performance and stability of the Flash plugin on OSX and Linux are not as good as on Windows, they still mostly work and are kept up to date by Adobe. Don't forget that Flash is also supported on the Wii browser (even if that plugin is outdated) and should soon be available for Android and Linux devices running on ARM processors. Expecting the plugin to deliver the same level of performance and reliability on all these platforms is overly optimistic. Of course the performance and stability situation would probably be better if Flash was an open source standard like HTML5 or Canvas, but I don't see these technologies replacing Flash anytime soon.

As stupid as it sounds, I couldn't have my wife use a device that can't play Farmville to access the internet because these kind of games are a huge percentage of her web experience, and it is the same for more than 100 millions other users. Farmville not working is THE reason I won't buy her an iPad.

Before we can do away with Flash there needs not only to be good support for an alternative (HTML 5, Canvas etc...) on multiple platforms, but also good development tools for that alternative that can rival Adobe Flash CS4 and a large ecosystem of web games and applications. That's the chicken and egg problem: you need a good ecosystem to be present before you can profitably use the new technology, but you need to use the new technology to develop a good ecosystem. It think that we'll get there eventually, but not before several years.

So, until Farmville is available in HTML5 and Canvas, we're stuck with Flash. In fact, I think that the Flash support present in Linux and soon in Android will allow competing tablets from MSI and others not only to compete with the iPad on an equal footing, but even to gain a significant market share in the tablet space. I'll concede that the iPad do benefit from a large library of games and applications inherited from the iPhone and iPod touch, but they are competing with pretty much the whole online games phenomenon, and tablets based on Android, Linux and Windows will also benefit from these platform's respective software libraries.

I can be satisfied by games from the App store and a limited version of the web for a phone or PDA, but for a tablet I want the full web experience and currently that means Farmville and Flash, so for now it sounds to me like Apple does not want my business...